Jordan Peterson on economics: what the evidence says · JRE #1769

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

In the full transcript, Peterson completes the sentence: "The Chinese produce more engineers every year than Americans have engineers," and he repeats the same comparison later in the episode ("the Chinese are producing as many engineers every year as the Americans have engineers"). Taken literally, this compares China's annual engineering graduates to the entire existing stock of engineers working in the United States, which numbers well over a million. National Science Foundation data confirm a related but different comparison: China has been the world's top producer of natural sciences and engineering degrees since 2007, awarding on the order of 1.4 to 2 million engineering-related bachelor's degrees a year versus a few hundred thousand in the United States depending on classification, and China also produces more science and engineering doctorates annually than the US. That is an annual-graduates-to-annual-graduates comparison, not a graduates-to-existing-workforce comparison. Researchers, including a widely cited Duke University study, have also cautioned that Chinese graduate totals are inflated by counting sub-baccalaureate and vocational credentials as engineering degrees, and that per-capita and quality-adjusted comparisons narrow the gap considerably. The general premise that China outproduces the US in annual engineering graduates is well documented, but the literal claim as stated, that one year of Chinese engineering graduates exceeds the total US engineer workforce, is unsupported by the cited data.